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Posted by Koyono Staff on
May 7, 2015

The bolstr Small Carry was reviewed back in January by bag guru Blaine Ballard at LoadedPocketz.com. Overall, I think he did a good job going into the details of the bag, while also offering good ideas on how to improve on the design. I welcome Blaine’s suggestions and look forward to seeing how we can include them moving forward.

One thing that I take exception to (until we have a chance to see the bag he received) are his comments on the stitching. It is way out of spec (it should be all black) and there are three lines of stitching with varying color and thread-count (threads per inch), which means it was done by another machine at another time. Importantly, this edge is to be double stitched by the same machine at the same time and, therefore, should have the same number of threads per inch. (Here is an example of how it should look.) Furthermore, our specs are very specific in terms of calling for black as the only acceptable thread color, which (the thread) was supplied to the manufacturer by us for this production run. There is no reason they would have used any other thread than the black nylon thread we provided.

What happened with the bolstr that was reviewed? I am scratching my head and currently investigating this with our manufacturer. A new one was sent to Blaine, along with a pre-paid return label. I reached out to him via email and his website, but have not heard back. I am certain he is busy and will get around to returning the first bolstr he received for our evaluation. In the meantime, I thought it was important to share some perspective on the matter from my vantage point.

I understand unexpected things happen, but we have not received any other reports of a similar nature from customers or Kickstarter backers. While I believe this to be a very isolated incident, it is super important to get to the bottom of what happened as it is not acceptable.

As I commented on Blaine’s post, if any customer receives a bolstr that looks like the one he reviewed, we will send a new one ASAP.

Once again, I thank LoadedPocketz for taking time to review the bolstr and look forward to making future improvements!

Jay Yoo

UPDATE 2015-05-07: We confirmed with the owner of the manufacturer (a US based military contractor) that no other thread than black should have been used on any bolstr, and that operation was sewn on double needle sewing machines. We are hoping to get the sample back soon to conduct forensics on the thread to see when the manufacturer might have had it in their facility. They are also committed to learning how this might have happened.